Angels in the Architecture

The wonderment of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life.

YESSIR, THAT’S MY BABY: Brad Pitt and child. - IMAGE: Merie Wallace

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The Tree of Life, a project that has gestated in
the mind of director Terrence Malick for 32 years, asks questions it
cannot answer. That is exactly what makes it the most sublime piece of
sacred art from this young century. The movie opens with God’s big
conversation-stopper in the Book of Job: “Where were you when I laid the
foundations of the earth?” Malick takes that as a challenge—the movie
hinges on an hourlong re-enactment of the planet’s evolution, complete
with colossal nebulae, walloping meteors and a wounded plesiosaur—then
he responds with a query of his own: “What are we to you?” Sunday-school
veterans will remember, however, that the Tree of Life was one of two
trunks named in the Garden of Eden; the other was the Tree of the
Knowledge of Good and Evil, and you couldn’t eat from both. The movie
seeks a peace that surpasses understanding. If it doesn’t get there,
well, who does?

“A man who writes of
himself without speaking of God,” Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht wrote
in his later days, “is like one who identifies himself without giving
his address.” Malick gives precise geographical coordinates. It turns
out that God—or at least little Terry Malick’s first stirrings of the
divine—was hiding in Waco, Texas. (Don’t tell the ATF.) Malick likes to
disappear, too—he was gone two decades between Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line—so autobiographical speculation is a pointless game to play, but The Tree of Life
narrows its scope gradually from the farthest red dwarfs to the 1950s
childhood of one suburban Lone Star boy, who runs barefoot through the
billowing clouds of the local fumigation truck. As the tyke is cradled
in his mother’s arms, she points to a sheer blue sky and tells him,
“That’s where God lives.” This tidbit of information sparks the most
ecstatic montage in Malick’s canon since the tree-fort dance in Badlands:
a two-minute sequence of dusky bedtimes and exuberant wake-ups,
hayrides and sparklers, set to Czech composer Bedrich Smetana’s swirling
“Vltava.” We have seen the creation of the world; now we see the
creation of one human consciousness.

That connection,
between one mind and all the universe, is the only meeting point any of
us have, and Malick repeats it throughout The Tree of Life, with
his trademark choir of voice-overs rising to converge. I’ll have to
watch the film again to be sure—and I can’t wait—but I’m pretty sure the
riverbed where two dinosaurs have a fateful confrontation is the same
waterway where young protagonist Jack (a limpid Hunter McCracken) sits
down and weeps. By then, we know his reasons for crying: His father
(Brad Pitt) is a clenched fist of blocked ambition, and emotionally
pummels his sons to become winners in a cruel world, while his mother
(Jessica Chastain) counters with a fragile argument for wandering and
acceptance. The movie feels like an explanation for why Malick has been
so reluctant to produce scheduled work. With the hero’s puberty comes a
rebellion against the tyranny of earthly and heavenly fathers. “Why
should I be good if you aren’t?” Jack asks—and at this point, the movie
had my number so completely that I feared it would come up with a
reason.

It doesn’t, thank goodness. Dissenters from The Tree of Life’s
Palme d’Or win have described the picture as “flailing”; this is
exactly the wrong word. If anything, it is too refined, too composed: It
sometimes resembles a Tumblr feed from a design-smitten photographer.
In its final sequence, a grown Jack (Sean Penn) rides up a Houston
skyscraper and—in a probably unintentional nod to Willy Wonka’s Great
Glass Elevator—ascends to a healing vision of heaven. This is not very
persuasive, and it doesn’t matter: What is so piercing about The Tree of Life is not that it knows life’s answers, but that it knows how the questions feel.
It has immense scope, sure (the credits include a department of
“Astrophysical Realm Visual Effects”), but also a detailed memory for
the pangs of faith and doubt. Malick’s final shot is of a bird flitting
through towers and bridges: a suggestion that the spirit of God still
moves through the things we build.

97SEE IT:The Tree of Life is rated PG-13. It opens Friday at Fox Tower.